IDEA No 21
THE PROJECT
In March 1989, while working at CERN, the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee recognized that although CERN was nominally organized in a hierarchical structure, it was in fact an interconnected web. It needed an information-sharing system to match. He proposed using hyperlinks to connect and share documents over the internet. He called this idea The Project.
The invention of the World Wide Web was celebrated at the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Most of the technology for the Project already existed. People had been sharing information over the internet for a decade or so. Hypertext and markup language had been around since the 60s. The Domain Name System was up and running. Berners-Lee has since said, ‘I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and ta-da! The World Wide Web.’ On 6 August 1991, with the help of Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee published the first website. Visitors to the site learnt how to create a webpage, use a browser and set up a web server. Initially, the Web was far from worldwide. It was only accessible by a handful of people at CERN who had a NeXT computer. This was soon to change. By the end of 1992 the Web was global.
Its popularity was due to its simplicity. It was, and still is, easy to link to another page. The use of one-way links drew criticism from some. Ted Nelson raged, ‘Ever-breaking links and links going outward were precisely what we were trying to prevent’ (see Xanadu), but the genie was out of the bottle. The Web received a further boost in 1993 with the release of Mosaic (see Web Browser), which extended the reach of the Web beyond computer scientists and academics. The same year, the University of Minnesota announced that it would start charging for Gopher, a widely adopted internet search-andretrieval tool. Users switched to the Web en masse.
If the internet is the digital equivalent of the printing press, the Web is moveable type. Just as moveable type allowed the accumulated knowledge of the human race to reach every person who could read, the Web extends this knowledge to everyone with access to a computer. And just as the Gutenberg Bible signified the start of the Industrial Age, the Web signals the birth of the Information Age.■
‘I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and ta-da! The World Wide Web.’
A live portrait of Tim Berners-Lee (an early warning system) by Thomson and Craighead, 2012, commissioned by the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK.